Leave it to Autumn

Andrew Stephens

AT THE heart of Alex Miller's home - cosy rooms, charming furniture, fine paintings gracing every wall - is a handsome, mighty solid Rayburn wood stove. Some of the creamy enamel is chipped. Its iron top must have hosted many a kettle and pot and it has clearly been much loved; no one would suspect, though, that this sturdy stove has quite another life beyond the Miller hearth.

Just such a Rayburn makes so many appearances in Miller's new novel, Autumn Laing, that it seems unlikely it would not be based on a real one nestling in the author's home, if not somewhere in his domestic history. Sure enough, here it is in a central room and Miller regards it proudly. It is hooked up to the hydronics, he explains, thus heating the five main rooms of the house beautifully in winter. Today the Rayburn rests, for it is spring and warm.

It is Autumn, though, with whom we are preoccupied. She is the woman whose name gives Miller's new fiction its title and she, too, has an echo in the real world in the person of the late Sunday Reed, the philanthropist and art collector who, with her husband, John, was at the centre of that spirited, bohemian milieu at the Bulleen dairy where they lived, the property later becoming the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

We naturally look for the sources, the inspirations, the lineages of characters when we read a piece of fiction known to borrow from well-documented and famous lives.

While Miller says Sunday and her one-time lover, the painter Sidney Nolan, informed his imagination for his characters Autumn Laing and Pat Donlon, he also insists that we will not find any insights into those real people in his book. They, he encourages us to accept, are but phantoms whose lives-as-lived are a loose framework for the narrative. Unlike the Rayburn, they are not directly transposed into Autumn Laing; we must not endanger the poetry of literature by a literal reading, he warns.

That doesn't stop a reader from wondering and perhaps delving into the lives of the Reeds and Nolan and their friends to discover the truths of those existences. Scholar Janine Burke has done much in this regard, having published The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (2004) and Dear Sun (1995), the letters between Sunday and artist Joy Hester.

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Miller's work is fiction - as is Steven Carroll's recent Nolan-themed work, Spirit of Progress - that germinated, in part, when he found himself wondering what might have happened had someone such as Sunday, with her rich, complicated life, gone on to experience another decade (she took her own life 10 days after her husband died in 1981).

What if she had come to the point where she could tell all; reflect on her life and loves and relationship to art?

Miller says the tension of the reality of the Reeds and Nolan against that of his characters in Autumn Laing is something he, and hopefully his readers, will be unable to resolve. To read too much into the connections would be a serious misreading, he says. As his wife pointed out to him, the origins of Autumn's character can be found elsewhere in Miller's history, far from Sunday Reed.

Autumn - Miller talks of her as if she were real - came to him as a distinct voice while he was sitting in Holland Park in London almost a year ago. He had long thought he might write a book referencing the life of Sidney Nolan and had a chapter completed; then he had a book tour in Britain. Sitting in that park, watching squirrels and recalling his London childhood, the book's form altered in his mind.

The voice of Autumn Laing - distinct and commanding - started up in his head, talking to him.

''She inhabited me,'' he says, as if she were a wraith. ''It was really scary.'' But he loved the sound of her voice, the energy and urgency in it. ''She said, 'Get out of the way, Al, and let me do this.'''

He wanted to but was worried her voice might leave him. That chapter he had already written before ''she'' appeared became the second chapter of the re-imagined book but he realised that this chapter's third-person voice was how Autumn might have written it ''because in a sense she and I are the same person - but in a poetic and mysterious way that has to remain poetic and mysterious, otherwise we've lost it''.

As a result, Miller's book starts exuberantly and engagingly in the first person with Autumn's distinct, amusingly cranky words. She takes us in at once. The second and many of the subsequent chapters are in an entirely different voice, a traditional narrative with Autumn as the more sober memoirist. When she reasserts herself at regular points, it is as if she is wrestling for supremacy over the novel with herself - or her ideas of having critical distance from events she wants to recount with some sense of detachment.

Or perhaps she is tussling with Miller. By the time he reached the fourth chapter, which he planned to write in Autumn's voice, he wondered whether she would still be there. He - this confident writer who has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award (twice), The Age Book of the Year (2010) and the 2011 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, among others - was terrified she might not.

''And I go into the study and I sit down that morning and I think, 'What is there to say?' And literally, she says, 'Never mind about that, leave it to me'. And off she goes. I just felt great.''

Over the next intensive months of writing - 10 hours a day, six days a week, for five months - he would wake up in the early morning and be itching to cross the house into his book-lined study to work. He doesn't think he will find someone like that again and was sorry when this muse's visitation ended.

Still, it hardly stopped him working, for Miller is no slouch; as he says, he has twice now found himself well into the writing of his next book just as the first editions of the previous book landed on his desk. This spring morning, the first printing of Autumn Laing has arrived but his mind is deeply into his next work, which he has been powering away on. As a reminder, just near his desk is a large stack of papers amassed during the construction of Autumn Laing: the drafts.

Also in this room of books are many shelves devoted to the visual arts, little surprise given that Miller has such a great love for the paintings on his walls. Little surprise, too, that there are several stories to tell (which he does) about how he came to love art so much.

The first involves his father.

''The memory is of an almost mythological beauty and is still at the centre of my life where my father and I were together as friends in a trusting relationship that was related to things that aren't useful - but things that are art,'' Miller says. ''And I loved that, I love the memory of it. It's very precious to me. That's where I got that original interest in art. He would take me to all the galleries - the National Gallery [in London] is still one of my favourite places to go. Once I left school, nothing of that kind happened again.''

His teachers had told him and his fellow students they were ''bottom of the barrel'' and he felt there was no pathway to follow when he left school that would lead him to any of those things his father had made him aware of. He needed to escape, so he went to the countryside and worked as a labourer in Exmoor, in England's south-west. He loved the wilderness.

While there - and this is the second story about art seducing Miller - an Australian man gave him a book with photographs of Australia in it. They infiltrated his imagination so powerfully he wanted to go there, passionately. He thought it was the ultimate wilderness, the finest expression of freedom.

Miller is not sure what happened to the book. What he does know is that when he came to Australia - working at one time as a stockman in Queensland - he ended up being contacted by Barrett Reid, a close friend of the Reeds and Nolan, after the publication of Miller's first novel The Tivington Nott. Miller told Reid about the photo book given to him in Exmoor and Reid realised - because he knew them so well - that the photos had been taken by Nolan.

Miller became good friends with Reid and they used to visit Heide together. He recalls a coach house there that (like the Rayburn stove) is transposed into Autumn Laing. Reid asked Miller to retrieve something from the mezzanine in the shed and there, up the ladder, he found unstretched paintings and a box of Nolan letters (now archived at the State Library).

Reid told him many anecdotes about the Heide people and they went to exhibitions together, Miller pushing him around in his wheelchair.